Virtualization Control Room

The Proxmox Virtual Environment has developed from an insider’s tip to a free VMware ESXi/ vSphere clone. We show you how to get started setting up a PVE high-availability cluster.

Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) is an open source virtualization solution that has been under development by Vienna Proxmox Server Solutions since 2004. Proxmox VE is fully licensed under GPLv2, so it has no restrictions for business use – unlike some free or personal licenses for comparable competitive products. Proxmox Server Solutions, however, also offers a subscription model for enterprise customers with various support levels between EUR 120 and 800 per year.

From the beginning, Proxmox was conceived as an easy-to-install appliance with a bare-metal installer that can be configured via a web interface. PVE also supports KVM-based guests, as well as OpenVZ containers. This relatively unusual combination makes it clear that PVE is intended for business use.

Nesting of hypervisors, known as a nested virtualization, makes it possible to set up a complete virtualization scenario with a data center, storage, and high-availability functions on a laptop. In this article, we show you how, with Linux iSCSI and free VMware trial versions.